HOUSTON — A chorus of National Rifle Association leaders on Saturday warned members at the group’s annual meeting that President Barack Obama and gun control advocates will stop at nothing to curtail their rights.

Using dire language, they predicted that liberals will try to use the next shooting tragedy to rally support for gun control measures far stronger than what’s been debated since the December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“Revenge is what is motivating the president’s unremitting challenge to gun owners today,” said Jim Porter, who will formally become the group’s president on Monday. “Obama is meeting and plotting with the who’s who of the gun ban movement.”

NRA chief Wayne LaPierre said the Senate vote two weeks ago to block background check legislation “is but one skirmish in what can only be defined as one long war against our Constitutional rights.”

He said the group is “in the midst of a once in a generation fight for everything we care about.”

“Even more critical battles” loom before us, he said. “We have the chance to secure our freedom for a generation or lose it forever.”

LaPierre announced that the NRA has grown to a record 5 million members in the wake of the post-Newtown battle.

“So we don’t care if it is round one, round two or round 15, the NRA will go the distance,” he said. “We will never give up or sacrifice our constitutional freedom. Not one single inch!”

“We will never surrender our guns. Never,” he added. “By the time we’re finished, the NRA must and will be 10 million strong.”

Two different speakers at the Saturday morning session quoted an old Margaret Thatcher line that victories in politics are never final.

“We are stronger right now than at any time in our 142-year history, but the fact is we have to be stronger because right now our freedom is under attack like never before,” said Chris Cox, the group’s chief lobbyist.

Where there used to be hundreds of anti-gun voices, Cox said, there are now thousands – including Organizing for America.

“Make no mistake: we are in a culture war,” he said.

LaPierre seized on the lockdown in Boston last month to argue that guns should be more available, not less.

“Residents were imprisoned behind the locked doors of their own homes,” La Pierre said. “Frightened citizens sheltered in place with no means to defend themselves … How many Bostonians wish they had a gun two weeks ago?”

LaPierre said that there will always be people who want to inflict harm, and that recent episodes show the need for individuals to arm themselves.

“Lying in wait right now is a terrorist, a deranged school shooter, a kidnapper, a rapist, a murderer waiting and planning and plotting in every community across our country, lying in wait right now,” he said. “No amount of political schemes, congressional legislation, presidential commissions or media roundtables will ever change that inevitable reality.”

In Boston, LaPierre proclaimed in a fiery half-hour speech to thousands of cheering members, “good guys with guns stopped terrorists with guns.”

“No bill of Congress, no Rose Garden speech will ever change that inescapable fact: that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said.

LaPierre also lashed out at Obama for saying that the NRA lied about the failed background check bill. He said it was actually the president who lied during his fall campaign when he said he did not want to go after the Second Amendment.

Oliver North, the retired lieutenant colonel involved in the Iran-Contra affair that nearly brought down Ronald Reagan’s presidency, likened his experience in the 1980s to what LaPierre has gone through the past few months.

“He didn’t bemoan the malicious lies being spread about his character, the threats to his family or the spiteful intrusions into his privacy,” said North, an NRA board member. “Instead, he decided to stand and fight. He led the way.”

The group already has its eyes on beating those who broke with them in the 2014 midterm elections.

“I hear some Americans say, ‘With the last election the country is lost.’ No! No, an election was lost,” said Porter, the incoming president. “There’s another election more important for the Second Amendment right around the corner. With the U.S. Senate and the House up for grabs, we as individual NRA members can … regain the political high ground.”